


In Love and War, Don't Seek Counsel

by sinuous_curve



Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: Bondage (Other), Community: kink_bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 07:55:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/235839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Most of being Steve’s -- or Captain America’s, really -- right hand man entails busting into Hydra weapons factories and blowing them to hell with stolen Hydra weapons, making sure that Cap has room to use his superpowers to the greatest effect while no one on their side gets killed in the process. Bucky used to be afraid every single time he heard the sharp report of gunfire, but since Cap came and pulled him out of a very literal hell, there isn’t much room left in Bucky for something like fear. Dying can’t be worse than what Schmidt’s pet scientist did for kicks. And being a part of a team as special as the one he’s on now keeps him feeling like he’s varnished in heroism. It’s more brilliant explosions and less humping it through sticky mud in the rain. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	In Love and War, Don't Seek Counsel

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to lyo and dancinbutterfly for audiencing, and insunshine for betaing.

Most of being Steve’s -- or Captain America’s, really -- right hand man entails busting into Hydra weapons factories and blowing them to hell with stolen Hydra weapons, making sure that Cap has room to use his superpowers to the greatest effect while no one on their side gets killed in the process. Bucky used to be afraid every single time he heard the sharp report of gunfire, but since Cap came and pulled him out of a very literal hell, there isn’t much room left in Bucky for something like fear. Dying can’t be worse than what Schmidt’s pet scientist did for kicks. And being a part of a team as special as the one he’s on now keeps him feeling like he’s varnished in heroism. It’s more brilliant explosions and less humping it through sticky mud in the rain.

And, even better, between assignments they get the odd smattering handful of days to stand down, while the brass gathers up enough recon and intelligence to feel a little less guilty about sending half a dozen guys in against miniature armies. Bucky spent months in Italy with his feet rotting in soaked socks while his unit was slowly decimated; he’s not so eager to go charging back toward Schmidt that he can’t accept a day off with an untroubled conscience. _Steve_ has the problem there, but that’s Steve. He’s noble like that.

They end up in a rickety old former motel during that down time. It’s just two days, while one or two more planes try to sneak over the base location and not get themselves disintegrated in a blue light like pieces of crisped skin fluttering through the air. Bucky spends the evening in a very makeshift bar set up by some enterprising local with a hidden stash of booze, getting good and drunk with the rest of the team. They tell the keep behind his slapped together bar made of old shutters and faintly singed boards to put it all on Captain America’s tab. He rolls his eyes and holds out his hand for money, because everybody knows Captain America isn’t real.

Bucky laughs until he has hiccups.

Captain America sort of isn’t real to him, either, but that’s because every time he blinks he sees Steve -- his Steve, the one he keeps accidentally thinking of as Real Steve -- standing there, five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet, with lungs that wheeze any time he tries to go faster than a jog and no ability to back down from a fight. Bucky spent half his damn life running down alleys to the sound of Steve’s grunts and cries and the other half piecing him back together in the tiny bathroom of Steve’s shoebox apartment.

There isn’t any electricity and an illegal bar doesn’t warrant any supplies for light, so at twilight they all head to the tiny, bare rooms they’ve been haphazardly assigned in the ramshackle building. Only a couple of them have cots set up in the corners; the others have piles of blankets and a kind of shrugged acknowledgement that it’s only for a night or two.

Bucky shuffles past Steve’s door with his head swimming and looping pleasantly. He hasn’t been drunk with buddies since he left New York for England, and he’s humming one of the dirty songs he learned under his breath. It’s about a pretty army nurse named Annie and her sexy fannie. There’s a faint glow seeping from the crack beneath the door, but the light is dim and colorless. Bucky yearns a minute for light bulbs and wall switches that actually work when you click them on. The intensity of the desire surprises him. He thought he’d miss his bed more than working lights.

He presses his hand to the door, then his ear. They have another day before they’re meant to head out to the next Hydra outpost, which probably means the low rustle of papers is Steve getting ready for the mission. He takes his responsibility to his team very, very seriously, with an intensity that sometimes makes Bucky pause. Though, really, it’s exactly what he would have expected from Steve had he ever really considered the possibility that Steve would somehow end up in the army.

Bucky doesn’t know how he feels about the scientist, Dr. Erskine, who turned Steve into what he is now. It’s either dim fury that he granted Steve’s bullshit wish to _go to the goddamn war_ or a hesitant gratefulness that he gave Steve the only thing he’s ever really wanted. Bucky never thought there was a real disconnect between Steve’s heart and his skinny little body, but at least now it’s easier for the rest of the world to see it.

“Cap?” Bucky says softly, tapping his first two fingers on the door. “Steve?”

“You can come in,” Steve says, voice low and a little bit tetchy around the edges. Bucky frowns to himself in the dark hallway and turns the knob, slipping into the slightly less dim room and closing the door tightly behind him.

Logically he knows there isn’t anything _that_ odd about one old friend dropping into another’s room, especially when they’ve been tossed together into the kind of circumstances that just don’t make much sense to the human mind if you let it think too hard, and _especially_ when they’re on the same team that’s basically supposed to save the whole world from an evil that could conquer it in half an hour. It’s not really weird, because men like Bucky and Steve don’t do things that would make it not okay. Good boys from Brooklyn learn not to do that.

Steve’s sitting cross-legged on his cot. It dips dangerously in the middle from his newly gained mass. He’s got a crumpled map spread out over his knees, marked every which way with thick red pen that’s bled a little at the edges. The outer bits and pieces of his uniform are scattered a little haphazardly over the rest of the tiny space; he’s down to pants and socks and a white tee-shirt that hugs tight to muscles that still surprise Bucky. He’s seen Steve stripped down to his boxers before; he used to look like a skinny branch with twigs attached at shoulders and hips.

“Do cellularly enhanced super humans not need sleep either?” Bucky asks, leaning against the door with his hands tucked into his pockets.

Steve yanks his eyes away from the map and manages a sheepish, half-hearted smile. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”

Bucky shakes his head. “You’re still a pretty bad liar.”

He pushes away from the door and stumbles the ten feet to Steve’s cot. From the way it sways just beneath Steve’s weight, Bucky has serious doubts that it’ll be able to handle two men, but he drops down onto it anyway. It’s only a six inch drop to the floor, anyway, and he’s just tipsy enough around the edges that he wants to be planted as firmly as he can. He lands on a pile of papers, all stamped at the top with TOP SECRET in bright ink. A couple lift up and waft into the air at the impact of Bucky’s mass; Steve’s mouth turns down at the corners and he gathers them back up in a neat pile that gets set on the floor beside his cot.

“You’ve been drinking,” he says, without real judgment or reproach.

Bucky nods. “You’ve been planning. You know that even you have to rest now and then, right? These days are supposed to be for rest, Cap.”

“I know.” Steve skims his hand through his hair and glances toward the window, but it’s been boarded over with crooked slats of wood and there wouldn’t be much in the way of light to see even if it were tossed open. “I can’t help it.”

“We’ll be okay. We’ve been okay so far.”

“We’ve been lucky,” Steve protests, slumping forward with his elbows on his knees. There’s the very faint bluish suggestion of bruises beneath his eyes, which sends a little spear of worry through Bucky. If Steve’s super human body can show signs of tiredness, that can’t be good. “Luck isn’t reliable.”

Bucky punches Steve on the arm. “Don’t you trust us to have your back?”

He’s teasing, obviously, and Bucky thinks Steve ought to know that he’s teasing. But a look of horrified shock passes over his face with such sincerity that Bucky almost snorts out a laugh. “Of _course_ I trust you. I just don’t want to see you -- any of you -- die.”

Having recently almost died, Bucky can appreciate that.

“You need to get your mind off all this stuff, just for tonight,” Bucky says, turning on the cot so he’s facing Steve head on. It’s still weird, to see his old Steve’s face attached to this new body. Bucky’s palms itch to touch him, just to make for absolutely certain that it’s not all some kind of deep cover trick cooked up by Schmidt. That his Steve isn’t still somewhere back in Brooklyn charging after bullies armed with a trash can lid and whatever piece of debris he found in an alley.

Steve frowns. “I’ll try?” he offers, looking at Bucky’s hand.

“Forget trying.” Bucky shakes his head and, perhaps foolishly, puts his hands on Steve’s wrists. “Let me help.”

A sudden tension curls around Steve that’s intimately familiar to Bucky, and has nothing to do with the doubt that constantly flares up in the back of Steve’s mind that his new abilities will fail him a critical moment and people will die for his lack. It’s an older tension than that, with origins back in Brooklyn during long summer days when Steve’s mom was working and they had the apartment to themselves. They were just kids then, during that last summer that Mrs. Rogers was alive, but they felt like grown ups. Eating whatever they wanted from the fridge and listening to whatever they wanted on the radio. Somewhere during those steamy summer days where they sat around in shorts and tee shirts with the rattling metal fan turning listlessly about the room it changed. They shifted a couple inches closer to each other, then closed the gap completely.

Bucky remembers the first time. The blinds were down so Steve’s room was dim and hot and stripes of gold summer light traveled lazily across his bed. The mattress’ squeaks sounded really, really loud when they started, but faded away once it got a little less awkward for the shock of what they were doing and a little more just about each other. Steve felt so _frail_ when Bucky skimmed his hand along the pronounced curves of his ribs.

Steve doesn’t look at all like he would feel frail any more.

“I don’t know, Bucky,” Steve says quietly. He believes in honor and duty, and has a reverence for the lines he imagines that separate boys in Brooklyn from soldiers in the United States Army. Bucky sometimes wishes that Steve had spent some time humping it through Europe with a bunch of other soldiers; maybe then he’d what Bucky already knows. Soldiers are just boys from Brooklyn or Fresno or Cleveland or Tallahassee, or London or Bristol or Brighton. You don’t get anything when you join up but a uniform and a gun, the rest depends on the man.

Bucky runs his hands up the inside of Steve’s arms, along the corded tendons. “Up to you,” Bucky says, rolling his shoulders in a loose shrug. “I just want to help, Cap.”

“Why are you calling me that?” Steve asks, not pulling away.

“Calling you what?”

“Cap.” He frowns. “You didn’t used to call me that.”

Bucky cocks his head. “Well, you used to just be my buddy Steve Rogers. You weren’t Captain America then.”

“I know.” Steve shakes his head and _looks_ at Bucky, and in that look he’s just a ninety pound asthmatic who was possibly the only person in the whole damned country who tried to lie his way _in_ to the army. “I don’t mean like that. I mean, the others call me Cap, but you’ve always called me Steve.”

Maybe the problem is that sometimes Bucky looks at Captain America in his red, white and blue uniform and shield, with his broad shoulders and strong back and his handful of inches on Bucky’s height, and feels more lost than he has since he first stepped on English soil. He missed it all, Steve doing whatever he did to prove himself the one worthy man of all soldiers to be given the scientist’s serum and he missed the change. He missed Steve’s turn as America’s new and improved Uncle Sam. He missed Steve becoming this hero _Captain America_. He _misses_ Steve.

“Eveything’s changed, hasn’t it?” Bucky muses. “I always thought that whatever happened with the girls who wrote me letters for a little while or how many Nazis I killed, I knew that I would at least get back to Brooklyn and find you. Now you’re here and you’re the hero.” Bucky exhales. “It’s all backwards.”

Steve leans forward. “I didn’t mean for any of it to happen.”

“That’s not true,” Bucky says, straightening. “I mean, I don’t think you planned the particulars. But this is always what you wanted.”

Of course Steve has more than enough grace to look chastised. He sets his hand on Bucky’s knee and squeezes lightly. “Well, okay. This is what I wanted, a little. I just have to help, Bucky. This is more important than you or me.”

Bucky nods slowly, licking his lips. “But is Steve still in there, Cap? My buddy?”

Steve’s smile is small, but so heartbreakingly genuine and so completely Steve that it makes Bucky’s insides go soft and sweet in places he can’t ever talk about, but especially not in the middle of a war where the stakes are so high. “That’s the one thing I promised,” Steve says. “That I would stay who I was. A good man, I guess.”

Only Steve could look at himself and cast any doubt on whether or not he was a good man or not.

“Let me help you,” Bucky says, leaning in close enough to feel the heat coming off Steve’s body. His metabolism works four times faster than a normal person’s, which means he has to eat as much as a small elephant just to keep himself fueled up and that he gives off radiant heat like a stove top. When they have to bunk outdoors, everyone wants to sleep next to Steve just for the ambient warmth.

“Bucky,” Steve sighs, but it’s the kind of quietly resigned noise that Bucky knows, too. Though less well, because Steve has a core made of stuff so stubborn it almost lacks any instinct to self-preservation. So far as Bucky knows, he’s the only person who has ever gotten Steve to submit when it comes to doing something for himself.

“Please.”

Steve nods. “Okay. Just tonight.”

Being in the tiny room on the rickety cot, knowing that their teammates and superiors are asleep on either side and just across the hall isn’t all that different from being in Steve’s tiny bedroom on his rickety bed, knowing his neighbors were in their apartments on either side. There’s the same sudden hush between them, because their breathing sounds too loud, and their heartbeats, and their skin shushing together.

Bucky presses his palms to Steve’s shoulders (God, they’re so unrealistically strong) and pushes him backward. Steve frowns a little, but allows himself to be leveled down so he’s lying on his back, legs still crossed with his arms almost falling off the cot because it’s that narrow. “Arms up,” Bucky says, taking Steve by the wrists and placing his hands on the thin frame of the cot. “Hold on. Don’t let go.”

“Why?” Steve murmurs, uncrossing his legs. One he lays along the edge of the cot, where the fabric has begun to fray away from the wooden frame. The other he keeps bent, so his socked foot presses into Bucky’s knee.

Bucky curls his fingers over Steve’s. “Because I said so.”

“What happens if I let go?” With anyone else, Bucky would take that as something teasing, a little light back and forth before they get down to the dirty-dirty. But Steve sounds genuinely curious, because he cares about the rules and their reasons and somehow ends up making Bucky want to be a better person.

“I don’t know, but you won’t like it,” Bucky says and finally, _finally_ , Steve manages a little smile.

The cot creaks ominously when Bucky shifts so he’s straddling the narrow width, but it holds. He maneuvers Steve’s legs so they’re draped over his, so he could lock his ankles and pull Bucky in tight if he wanted to. Bucky kind of wants Steve to do just that, but it’s a crapshoot any time they end up alone together what will happen. Steve vacillates between a kind of tight unhappiness that this is what they do and an uneasy sense that maybe the problem isn’t with them, exactly, as much as the rest of the world. Bucky pushes his hair away from his face and looks down at Steve, so broad now he takes up the entire span of the cot with his bulk. His shirt pulls tight against his arms raised over his head.

The uniform Howard Stark knocked together is fraying a little at the seams, and the colors aren’t half as bright as they were the first time Steve zipped himself in, spread out his arms, and asked, “How do I look?” There are stains on his pants; Bucky can see dirt and gunpowder and what might be a fine spattering of brown, dried blood on Steve’s hip. Even his tee-shirt, that never actually sees battle, has stains under both arms and at the collar. It’s stretched out a little, too.

Bucky bends over and presses his nose into the little dip of Steve’s bellybutton. He smells like sweat and mud and mold, but also the leather of his jacket and the comforting diesel of his motorcycle. He feels solid beneath Bucky’s palm, which is still strange.

It’s the first time Bucky has really been able to get his hands on Steve since he opened his eyes expecting Schmidt’s scientist and instead found Captain Goddamn America looking at him with scared, desperately hopeful eyes. “What are you doing?” Steve murmurs. Bucky feels the shift in his torso as he lets go of the cot with one hand.

Bucky snakes up his arm and catches Steve’s wrist. It’s twice as big around as it used to be. “I said to hold on, Cap.”

For a moment, Steve goes totally and utterly still with Bucky’s fingers digging into the fine array of tendons and bones at his wrist. He’s probably imagining it, but Bucky thinks he can almost _feel_ Steve new and improved pulse thudding beneath the pads of his fingers. “Is this helping?” Steve asks quietly, uncertain.

Bucky lifts his head. It’s an odd angle; Steve’s chest looks even bigger and broader than it is and his eyelashes are a long sweep against his cheek. In some ways, they’ve switched around what they used to be and Bucky’s learned to live with that, maybe because he always thought that Steve would be the better soldier given half a chance. But there are more ways where they haven’t changed; Steve is used to Bucky protecting him and Bucky can’t imagine a world where, at the end of the day, he’s not the one taking care of Steve.

“Yes,” Bucky says with a certainty he doesn’t totally feel.

For another moment Steve hesitates, then he lifts his arm back up and closes his hand tightly around the cot’s splintering frame. His knuckles turn a bloodless yellow over the ridges of bone from how hard he’s holding on. Bucky wants to kiss them and maybe he will, at the end of this thing he needs to do.

He turns his attention back to Steve’s torso and decides he’s got to use this rare moment alone to the fullest, because they’re in a _war_ and Steve is Captain America, but Bucky has learned that there are damn well no promises when it comes to blood and guts, because the glory always seems to get tamped down beneath the horror. There aren’t any guarantees about what will happen when the sun rises.

He pushes himself upright and slides his fingers beneath the tight pull of Steve’s shirt. His skin is so unreasonably warm Bucky feels like it inks way deep down in his bones where he’s been cold for as long as he’s been in Europe. Steve’s abdominals tighten at the touch and Bucky, unthinking, makes a soft shushing sound. Like he might use on a kid who fell and skinned their knee. “I’ve got you,” Bucky says. He pushes Steve’s shirt up as far on his chest as he can without having Steve let go of the cot.

Steve is just as pale as he was back in Brooklyn. Bucky remembers people _laughing_ when Steve ventured outside shirtless on the hottest days of summer to go to the YMCA pool or even to just sit on the steps. It’s unthinkable now. Bucky runs his hands over the flat, hard planes of musculature in Steve’s stomach, up to his chest. Nobody would laugh now.

“That tickles,” Steve gasps, lifting his shoulders up a little bit.

Bucky looks at him, eyebrow raised. “Are you sure tickles is the word you’re looking for?”

Steve shakes his head, eyes squeezed closed. “Bucky.”

If there was time, Bucky would _take_ his time, but he knows there isn’t. Everything else aside, when morning comes it’ll be the last day of their down time and that means that everyone will start shifting out of the nonchalance they forced themselves to find. And the day after that they’ll be hitting another Hydra installation and maybe Schmidt will be there and maybe it’ll be the special set up that vaporizes them all as soon as they get within ten feet of the place.

“Just hold on,” Bucky says, scraping his blunted nails down Steve’s chest until he hits the waistband of his specially made Captain America uniform trousers. Bucky, personally, much prefers the version Howard Stark came up with to the tights they had Steve dancing around in for the crowds back at home. “I’ve got you.”

Everything about Steve’s uniform was designed to be big and solid and Bucky understands the reasoning behind that. People are scared of big things, in the same way that they’re also comforted by them. His belt buckle is about the size of Bucky’s palm, though, and that feels strange. Steve was the kind of person who didn’t wear belts because they didn’t come in sizes small enough to loop around his waist unless he drilled extra holes in the leather. It makes an almost cheerful tinkling sound when Bucky undoes it.

The cot creaks as Steve tightens his hands hard around the wood. Bucky pauses and presses the flat of his palm to Steve’s stomach. “You okay?”

“Yes,” Steve nods. “I just-- I don’t--”

Bucky nods. “I know. It’s okay.”

There are four buttons keeping Steve’s fly done and Bucky pops them one by one with a practiced gesture that only feels a little awkward coming from an exact opposite angle. He knows why military issue clothing doesn’t have zippers; they’re fractionally louder than buttons and that fraction could be the sound that gets you caught. But still, there’s something a little frustrating about having to take the time to fumble with them when it’s not about life and death.

Underneath his Captain America uniform Steve has his regulation white boxers, now starting to turn grey. Steve’s already bulging the front of them and Bucky, for reasons he doesn’t want to look too closely at, feels something in his chest release at that tangible confirmation that yes, there still is something between them. Leaving behind skinny Steve Rogers doesn’t mean leaving behind everything that Steve cared about.

Bucky palms at Steve’s cock through the thin fabric just a little more roughly than they got to back in Brooklyn. It was all new then, the ability to touch someone else and have them touch you back. They were gentle with each other because they were scared. Bucky doesn’t have room for fear any more, not after everything that he’s survived. Even this thing that exits between him and Steve doesn’t scare him.

“We’re gonna get out of here,” Bucky says, letting his eyes roam up and down the length of Steve’s body, from the cut of his hipbones to the muscles cording in his neck and the flex of his arms holding so hard to the cot. Steve cares so much about pleasing the people that matter to him. “I promise you.”

Steve makes a noise that can only really be called a whimper; Bucky eases his cock from his boxers and thumbs lightly at the head. Steve shudders through his whole body and the cot creaks and groans in complaint. “You can’t promise that,” Steve manages to murmur, fighting to keep himself still. “You can’t, Bucky.”

“I can.”

So much of Bucky’s life is making himself do things that scare the hell out of him, and part of that is taking care of Steve. This new Steve scares him, because at some point he’s going to reach the limits of what even his super body can do and that’s a day Bucky doesn’t want to see. Bucky spits on his hand and pulls a slow, steady stroke on Steve’s cock. That’s gotten bigger, too. He wonders if Steve even noticed, or if he was so drunk on dreams realized that it was the very last thing he thought about.

The last time they did this was after Steve’s fifth unsuccessful attempt to get into the army, when some bully decided to pick on a kid a third his size. Bucky remembers it being oddly easy then, because Steve was glum and frustrated and it was the best way Bucky knew to get him to snap out of it before the Exposition. There wasn’t really anything that odd about falling into Steve’s bed in his apartment that was so small it was literally a sink crammed into one half of the room, a hotplate on the counter, and a bed on the other half. And when they were done they met the girls and Bucky could go back in time and kick himself for thinking that was a good idea.

“You trust me?” Bucky asks, stroking slowly and carefully along the length of Steve’s cock. He can see a little bit of wetness beading at the head, so he rubs his thumb against the slit. He can smell sex coming up off Steve the way heat used to rise from the pavement on the hottest days back home, when little kids would sneak eggs and see if they could get them to fry on the sidewalk.

Steve nods hard, unaware that the cot’s frame has started to shake and strain from how hard he’s clutching. “I trust you.”

“Promise?” Bucky asks, picking up his pace. The tiny room echoes with the frantic slide of their skin together; it’s a distantly wet sound that Bucky likes. He finds it comforting, which is maybe just the way the war’s done a number on him. Maybe not, maybe it’s Steve.

Steve groans. “I _promise_ ,” he gasps.

It takes just another stroke or two to have Steve’s hip hitching up away from the fraying fabric of the cot (though his hands stay exactly where Bucky put them, which probably says something about Steve as a person). He comes with a sound like a sob, spattering come on Bucky’s knuckles and just a little bit on the sleeve of his shirt at his wrist.

Bucky doesn’t tease. He doesn’t want to. He tucks Steve back into his boxers and does up the four buttons on his trousers. There isn’t a rag or anything to clean up with, so Bucky frowns a little and wipes the back of his hand off on Steve’s blanket. On the extremely off chance anyone happens to notice, they’ll probably just a get little kick out of Captain America doing something so incredibly unwholesome. Bucky eases down his shirt, too, and smooths out the wrinkles that cant over his chest from having been scrunched. All the while Steve keeps his eyes closed, slammed shut so hard little wrinkles fan out from the corners of his eyes.

“Steve.” Bucky stretches himself over Steve’s torso. He presses his nose for a moment to the hollow of Steve’s throat and inhales his scent again.

Steve makes a faintly inquisitive noise.

Bucky palms his way along the bend of Steve’s arms until he get to his hands. Gently, he pries at Steve’s fingers. “You can let go now.”

“Oh.” Steve’s eyes slip open to half-lidded languidness and he releases his fingers, wincing slightly at the stiffness in them. He looks at Bucky for the space of a breath, hands hovering over his head like he doesn’t know what to do with them. Then he carefully wraps them around Bucky’s waist, lacing his fingers in the small of Bucky’s back where his shirt’s ridden up to expose an inch or two of skin.

There isn’t really room for this kind of thing, not in the middle of a war. But Bucky believes in taking the things that are given to you and not asking a lot of questions. So he lets himself take a minute and close his eyes with his face pressed into Steve’s chest and Steve’s arms holding him close. He doesn’t think about the future in anything much more than the very abstract; someday the war will be over and some day they will go home, beyond that it’s wake up and survive, go to sleep when you can and do it all over again. But there might be a very small kernel of hope in this.

“Think you’re gonna sleep tonight?” Bucky asks.

Steve’s chuckle in a rumble in Bucky’s ear that reverberates in his newly cavernous chest. “Will you stay until I fall asleep?”

Bucky nods. “Sure thing, Cap.”


End file.
